On Ernesto's Travel

There is a perpetual desire burning inside me to constantly go places. As if the ground I stand on is never good enough to hold me, its soil not ripe enough for my tree of life to grow its roots. My latest calling is South America - to travel the dirt roads of Patagonia, deep into the Amazonian jungle, experiencing the richness of the Incan ruins, to eat the bloodiest Argentinian steak.

I came across "Chasing Che" -- a book by Patrick Symmes, who traced back the travels of Ernesto Guevara Lynch de la Serna and Alberto Granado; a journey that was immortalised by Hollywood's Motorcycle Diaries. There is a paragraph in the beginning of the book that I absolutely love because it sums up what I love about traveling.

In December of that year Guevara laid plans for a motorcycle trip across the hemisphere; it was a trip from which he would never come home, even when he returned. One journey leads necessarily to another, and the moped of 1951 gave way inevitably to the motorcycle of 1952... Guevara would return to argentina after eight months, a changed man- a man, as he himself put it, "in transition of some other conception of life." He was a traveler now; the act of discovery is not merely the basis of travel but is also the quintessential revolutionary act. Every long journey overturns the established order of one's own life and all revolutionaries must begin by transforming themselves. ("Chasing Che"; Patrick Symmes, p.10).

Once you start, you can never go back. The revolution is internal; an act of constant transformation through seeing the world, feeling other people and realising that one is nothing in relation to the universe.